


Trapped and Fluttering

by scioscribe



Category: Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
Genre: Developing Relationship, F/M, Kindness, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-08-20 23:27:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,881
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16565141
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Hareton helps Cathy rescue another poor creature from being trapped at the Heights.





	Trapped and Fluttering

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tenillypo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tenillypo/gifts).



A summer storm had sent a branch through the window of Zillah’s little room.  She’d gone on about it at length until Joseph had boarded it shut again, telling her with satisfaction that she would wait and wait for new glass for it and she’d see Judgment Day first.

Cathy dearly wished it had been her window instead.  She would have let it stay broken without complaint just for the sake of fresh air—the musk and honey smell of wind off the moor and the untempered sunshine.  Mr. Heathcliff could banish her upstairs and lock the door behind her, then, when a black mood took him, and she wouldn’t be denied everything for it.  She’d keep some part of the world outside the Heights.

But it had _not_ been her window.  And really, she consoled herself, if it had been, surely some devil’s insight would have told Mr. Heathcliff that she was relishing it and the end result would be the same.  Then she would be worse off than she already was, for with boards nailed across it she’d have no light as well as no air.  This low and creeping life had given her fantastic powers of invention when it came to cruelty—she hardly had to love a thing at all before she grasped how it could be taken from her.  Like her books.

Though of course those had since come back to her, her pleasure in them magnified by Hareton.  She’d own that she was not always the kindest teacher—nor, she’d have anyone know, was he always the most amiable student, and he could make such gruesome faces when he was vexed—but going over his letters with him had transformed her days.  He was her true window, letting in what was fresh and alive and changeable, and _he_ would not be boarded up or fixed out of pleasing her.

It was the more prosaic broken window, however, that occasioned something deeper between them.

At least, Cathy was convinced that was how the little bird had found its way indoors, though she didn’t discover it until the day after Joseph’s fit of carpentry was done with.  It wasn’t a house to stand open to good clean sunlight, went her reasoning, and if the bird had come in through one of the doors, it must have done so with company that could not have helped but notice it.  As they would notice it now, too, if she did not fetch it out-of-doors again.

She went at once to Hareton.

“It’s only a little bit of a bird,” she said.  “It wouldn’t even make a mouthful for one of the dogs, so you see, it must be made to go outside.”

“I can see it’d be no use cooking it up,” Hareton said, “but it seems fair trouble to go around shooing it when there’d be quicker and easier ways.”

“But I don’t want it killed!  Do you think I’d have bothered coming to you if that’s all I wanted?”

His face darkened to a dull red.  “Aye, I do, because you wouldn’t want to talk to no one else and nobody else’d want to talk to you.”

That was so true it was not worth arguing about.  “Oh, please, Hareton, help me.  You can tell me later all about my lack of charms and I’ll sit nodding and not even say a word and I’ll look the picture of chastised misery, only _do_ help me get it out of here before Mr. Heathcliff sees it.  Because he _will_ shoot it.”

_Or clip its wings and cage it._

“Put his boot to it’s more like,” Hareton said matter-of-factly.  He stood.  “We’ll clear it out, then.”

Cathy pressed a grateful kiss to his cheek.  She had done it before, of course, and more than once, though Nelly had scolded her for it each and every time, but this felt new.  Her agitation and his brief spell of anger had put coals in both their faces—when she’d kissed him, she’d felt the rebounding warmth of their flushed, quickened bodies put so close together.

She did not, she decided, have the luxury of dwelling on it then.  She motioned him upstairs with her.  They trod as softly on the stairs as children playing hide-and-seek—and it was true, Cathy thought, that she was hoping not to be found out.  She wanted to be the savior of the poor little thing.  This was not a house where small, weak creatures were likely to meet with any kindness.  But Hareton was not like that.  She had caught him digging birdshot out of the hindquarters of one of the older dogs, his right hand working out each little pellet of shot while his left stroked the dog's scruff to keep it calm.  She had seen him nursing a sick lamb—Mr. Heathcliff would surely have let it die and scolded it for its weakness as it passed.

However surly and sullen Hareton could get, she trusted him now to be far less brutish than she'd first thought—no, to even be sweet, though he didn’t look it.

She took him to the bird and said, in a whisper, “Do you know what kind it is?”

“Some kind o’ thrush, I’d wager.”

Oh, she was glad he had at last reached the point where he would answer her plainly, that they were past the awful setback she’d put them to with all her early scorn of him.  He no longer eyed her first, unfriendly and suspicious, to see if she were looking to make a joke of him.

Their thrush—it _was_ theirs, she decided boldly, for now that he was here, he had the same obligations to it she did, and she was sure the same enjoyment of it too—was a pretty creature, nearly small enough for her to have closed it in one hand.  It had a pale breast the orange shade of dawn, and the feathers on its back and wings were shingled brown with black and white markings.  His head was elegant, with those same three colors stacked neatly on top of each other.

“It must be a he,” Cathy said.  “It’s too colorful to be anything else.”

“Catch me looking so fashionable,” Hareton muttered, crouching down.

“I should like to.  I think you’d be very handsome.  You’re not _un_ handsome now.  And with a bath—”

“Well,” he said, stretching out his hand, “I’m still naught to this fellow, I suppose, and soap and water wouldn’t change that.  Come here, then.”

When Hareton was in a good humor, he had a low rumble of a voice; Cathy had grown to love it and the muddy flats of its wide Yorkshire vowels and the rattle of cart-wheels that seemed to reside within it.  The bird did not seem to feel the same.  It lit up into the air, but flew badly; it seemed confounded by the walls.  Poor thing—it was used to more space than the Heights could give it.  It wanted the sky.

Cathy ached for it.  It was this, not the window, that would break her and make her cry if she could do nothing about it.  If the bird died within these walls, she felt she would die with it.  She had to hope for a way out for them both.

She stood on her tiptoes, stretching out her hand to the fluttering bird.  “Please come down.”

“It won’t listen better for you being polite to it,” Hareton said.

Cathy squeezed her hands into fists.  Come down, she wanted to say, or I shall begin to hate you, because I am trying to grant you escape and you will not take it.  How dare you not want it?  Hareton may have been fooled into thinking Heathcliff a second father to him, but you and I know better, we have known other places, now come out, come out or be damned with you.  Come out or you’ll deserve the bars, you horrible, stupid, innocent thing.

It began, with shocking obedience, to batter itself against the window.

“Hareton, do you have a key to unlock that?”

“Nay,” he said, putting his hands in his pockets and watching it.  “You know I don’t, Cathy, or I’d have come and opened yours for you before.”

“But it’s making so much noise, and it would get out if we could just let it go where it wanted—”  Tears pressed against her eyes, hot and needling.  “It isn’t fair.  It wants to go.  It didn’t mean to come, it just did, and now it’s shut up and if he finds it—”  She shook her head, feeling her curls fall down to thrash around her.  She had grown so disorderly, she thought dully, so thankful for the smallest things—a splash of water, the touch of a comb, an open window.  She looked wildly about the room and found a shawl.  She wound it tightly about her fist.

“What’re you after?” Hareton said.

She didn’t answer but instead went to the window, ignoring the bird’s panic above her, and raised her fist.  She should like to strike something.  She was her mother’s daughter, in the end—the wild mother Mr. Heathcliff had known, not the tamed mother who had married her poor father.  She had an awful violence in her soul.

Hareton caught her hand in his.  “Don’t do that,” he said, with a gentleness in his voice that was both the softest and angriest thing she’d ever heard.  “If you need that done, I’ll do it, won’t I?”

“I don’t want you hurt.”

“I’ve had rougher things happen to me than this,” Hareton said.  He took the other end of the shawl and began wrapping it around his hand.  “And you’ve had your pains too and don’t need more, so let me do this, Cathy.  I’ll get your bird out safe and sound.”

The shawl was still caught around them both: Cathy let his hold on it pull her closer to him and she pressed up against his chest, her head down against his heart, her knuckles against his.  She could feel the movement of his breath and then, after a moment, the brush of his kiss against her hair.  He had never done that before.

“Together,” Cathy said.

“You’ll get cut up for nothing.”

“I’ll get cut up for it, and you, and because I want to.  I want to break something.”

Hareton shook his head, breathing out what might have been a laugh, and then he said, “Together, then,” and they drew back their entangled hands.

It took three such clumsy blows to break through the window, for they were as hobbled as children in a three-legged race, but the moment the glass shattered, the thrush exploded out into the dusky sky and beat its wings toward the setting sun.  Perhaps it would fly to the Grange—perhaps even farther than that.  It might go anywhere.

When Cathy looked over at Hareton again, she saw his gaze had been on it too.  He had begun to want something other than this place.  She laced her fingers through his within their hot, painful bindings, and started quietly telling him the names of the stars, even the ones they could not see.


End file.
